A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) national laboratories, as well as from the University of California at Davis, have developed the first-ever end-to-end simulation code to precisely capture the geology and physics of regional earthquakes, and how the shaking impacts buildings. The code will take advantage of exascale supercomputers, the future supercomputers that will be 50 times faster than the US’s most powerful system today. Their work is part of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a collaborative effort between the DOE’s Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Agency and was recently published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society’s Computers in Science and Engineering.

A 4.3-magnitude earthquake hit the Italian holiday island of Ischia at 8:57 p.m. local time on Monday night. Up to now, two women have been reported dead, one of whom having been hit by falling masonry from the church of Santa Maria del Suffragio, according to the Civil Protection Department in Rome. Many people were pulled out alive from the rubble, including a 7-month-old baby.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) examined a variety of bridge types along with design requirements under the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code. As part of the research, the seismic performance of shape memory alloy reinforced and post-tensioned bridge piers have been tested in the University’s Applied Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Structures (ALAMS). The results, published in the Journal of Structural Engineering, ASCE, point out that bridges are being built to withstand the force of an earthquake, however they are being overbuilt, resulting to unnecessary construction expenses.